'Alchemy' with cloth and color: Elin Noble exhibits at NBAM

Like a painter, Elin Noble applies color to her canvas, adding and subtracting hues until she has arrived at the completed composition. Unlike a painter, however, sometimes Noble can't even see the canvas she's working on.

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By Keith Powers

southcoasttoday.com

By Keith Powers

Posted Feb. 21, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated Feb 22, 2013 at 11:44 AM

By Keith Powers

Posted Feb. 21, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated Feb 22, 2013 at 11:44 AM

If You Go ...

What: "Elin Noble: Color Alchemy"When: Through April 28. An opening reception with the artist, free to the public, will be held from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday (rescheduled due to last Sunday's st...

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If You Go ...

What: "Elin Noble: Color Alchemy"

When: Through April 28. An opening reception with the artist, free to the public, will be held from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday (rescheduled due to last Sunday's storm).

Like a painter, Elin Noble applies color to her canvas, adding and subtracting hues until she has arrived at the completed composition. Unlike a painter, however, sometimes Noble can't even see the canvas she's working on.

Noble's exhibition of whole cloth quilts, "Color Alchemy," currently on view at the New Bedford Art Museum, shows dozens of large scale works that she creates in the venerable clamp-dyeing process known as itajime. Producing areas of color and areas where color is blocked, by folding her cloth accordion-like and clamping it tightly between two boards, then immersing it multiple times before stitching in nuances of color and texture, Noble creates vast, imaginative works. Shown at the museum in four major series of linked compositions, the result of decades of dyeing and quilting experience, Noble's quilts simultaneously show an artist's original insights and the impressive persistence of craft.

It takes time. "They go through many processes," she says of her pieces. "Some may take a couple weeks; frequently it's six to eight weeks. I'll work on more than one piece at a time, though, exploring parallel ideas or versions. One piece gets washed and ironed, and a different one will go into the dye bath. Even though I can be working on multiple pieces at the same time, they won't come out the same."

The process begins with the cloth — most of the work in "Color Alchemy" uses silk organza or cotton — sometimes entirely dyed black, sometimes left blank. Then the cloth is folded back on itself, clamped tightly between two boards, and dyed. Noble checks the result, removes color if she feels it necessary, then repeats the clamping and dyeing process.

Once the color is established, the stitching begins. Working with her own dyed thread — "I use cotton and silk thread that I dye myself," she says. "I found that the commercially dyed thread looked too garish" — Noble adds color detail and texture to the piece. "What I like doing with the stitching is to make it vibrate, so that when you're far away it seems like it might be all the same color, but that there's something about it that makes you get closer." The stitching is done on a long arm sewing machine, which gives Noble a large surface area — more than two-and-a-half feet in diameter — to work on.

That's the craft. The artistry comes from a variety of influences, some scattered about the exhibition. Of the four thematic sections, the series "Fugitive Pieces" occupies the largest space. Inspired by Canadian author Anne Michaels' novel of the same name, half a dozen quilts from the series greet visitors: "I chose them because of what would fit in the space," she says, "and I created one large quilt because I knew I would have the atrium space to work with. It was a challenge to be successful creating a large whole-cloth quilt this way. I also chose them so that they could speak to each other, sort of have a nice dinner conversation together."

The "Fugitive Pieces" are irregularly folded, meaning that the repeated pattern in the quilt is not symmetrical. "Symmetry can be static," she says. "There's a predictability to it, and that's why I evolved into folding irregularly."

The series began after Noble read Michaels' novel in 2008, and she continues to create pieces in this vein. The largest work, simply titled "Fugitive Pieces 3," took more than a year to finish. "The dye work was about two months, not every day, but over that period I decided where I wanted to be. Then the stitching — I don't think there was one day when I walked in and said it was done. I just kept doing these colors, until it seemed complete."

The exhibition also includes the installation "Vox Stellarum," a room full of hanging black-and-white dyed works on silk organza, in which Noble tries to re-imagine the moire patterns of an 18th-century print by Jakob Scheucher with her itajime process; "Leipziger Suite," a dozen collage works from marbled cloth that were recently done during an extended stay in Germany; and "Lake at Night," which explores a variation on the clamp-resist technique called kyokechi, where the clamped boards are first carved to allow patterns of color to seep in during the dying process.

Both itajime and kyokechi come from Japanese traditions.

Noble's earliest quilted artwork, called "Windows: In Memory," a response to a 19th-century painting by William Allen Wall, is also on display, as is Wall's original work. "As a response piece, it's very important to me," Noble says, "It's the first quilt of mine that I consider a work of art." This work led to a larger "Windows" series, a striking group that is "like viewing from the inside out of a window, or French doors, something we do a lot of in New England in the wintertime."

"Color Alchemy" runs through April 28. An opening reception with the artist, free to the public, will be held from 2 to 5 p.m. Sunday. For information visit www.newbedfordartmuseum.org or call (508) 961-3072.

This article was updated on Feb. 22, 2013, to reflect the following correction:

An incorrect name was given for the author of the novel "Fugitive Pieces," referenced in the Coastin' article about Elin Noble's exhibition. The author is Anne Michaels.